Page:Sketches of representative women of New England.djvu/558

Rh young love her. She takes up work in the old Orthodox church on Tory Hill, playing the organ, singing when needed, helping in the Sunday-school library. She opens her house, "Quilleote," for sociables and sewing-circles, and every autumn, just before leaving for her New York home, she gives a reading from her own books for the benefit of the old church, the only public reading she gives nowadays.

During her absence in Scotland in .June, 1904, Bowdoin College conferred on Mrs. Riggs the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature.

ARY ANN WRIGHT CHAPMAN, Past State Regent of the Daughters of the Revolution, is a native of Phillipston, Mass., and the daughter of Sylvester Carpenter and Susan D. (Burbank) Wright. Her father was for many years a manufacturer of iron-working machinery in Fitchburg, where the greater part of her life has been passed.

Her grandparents on the paternal side were William Kendall and Relief (Bowker) Wright, and on the maternal, Arthur and Sarah (Bates) Burbank. One line of her grandfather Bur- bank's ancestry goes back to John Webster, who was Governor of Connecticut in 1656; and one line of her grandmother Burbank's (born Bates), to Stephen Hopkins, of the "Mayflower" company of Pilgrims, 1620. Descent from Governor Webster is through his daughter Mary, who married a Mr. Hunt; Jonathan Hunt; Jonathan Hunt, Jr., and his wife, Martha Williams; Mary Hunt, who married Seth Pomeroy; Sarah Pomeroy, born in 1744, who married Abraham Burbank, and was the mother of Arthur Burbank, grandfather of Mrs. Chapman.

Descent from Stephen Hopkins Mrs. Chapman traces through his daughter Constance, who married Nicholas Snow; Mary Snow, wife of Thomas Paine; Mary Paine Cole; Hannah Cole Higgins; Israel Higgins; Ruth Higgins, wife of Captain Abner Stocking; Hannah Stocking, wife of Eleazer Bates; Sarah Bates, wife of Arthur Burbank and mother of Susan Doolittle Burbank, who (as indicated above) married Sylvester Carpenter Wright.

Among the ancestors of Mrs. Chapman who, as military men or as civilians, engaged in the public service in colonial times, may be mentioned Deacon Medad Pomeroy, of Northampton, who was a soldier at Turner's Falls in King Philip's War, 1676, and who served as Town Clerk and Treasurer, Register of Deeds, Associate County Judge, and Deputy to General Court; Ebenezer Pomeroy, Captain and then Major in the militia and high sheriff of the county; also General Seth Pomeroy and four other Revolutionary soldiers — namely. Captain Abner Stocking, John Bowker, Eleazer Bates, and Nehemiah Wright.

Seth Pomeroy served with distinction in the French and Indian wars. He was Major in the Massachusetts forces at the capture of Louisburg in 1745, was Lieutenant Colonel in the expedition against Crown Point in 1755, and at the death of Colonel Williams in the battle of Lake George, September 8, 1755, he took command of the regiment and ably assisted in winning the victory. In 1774-75 he was a delegate to the Provincial Congress. He was elected a Brigadier-general in February, 1775. He fought at Bunker Hill as a private, and was soon after appointed a senior Brigadier- general by the Continental Congress, but declined the honor in consequence of disputes about military rank, and retired to his farm. In the autumn of 1776, when New Jersey was invaded by the British, at the earnest solicitation of Washington, he again took the field, and, at the head of the military force he had raised, marched as far as the Hudson River at Peekskill, where he was taken ill with pleurisy, and died in February, 1777, in the seventy-first year of his age.

On June 17, 1898, it may be mentioned, Mrs. Chapman attended the unveiling of the monument in the old churchyard at Peekskill, erected by the Sons of the Revolution and his descendants. One of the inscriptions reads as follows: — , February 11, 1777.

I go cheerfully, for I am sure the cause we are engaged in is just; and the call I have to it is clear and the call of God. .

Abraham Burbank, of West Springfield,